


Word On The Street

by rokhal



Category: Ghost Rider (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Ableism, Aliens, Canon Disabled Character, Case Fic, Community: fan_flashworks, Doppelganger, Gang Violence, Gen, Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Newspapers, References to Drugs, Reporter Guero Valdez
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 09:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19059556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: Someone is copying homeless people in East LA.Student-reporter Guero Valdez is on the case.





	Word On The Street

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the fan-flashworks challenge "shelter" and the bingo prompt "double," as well as Rory's Story Cubes, which rolled me:  
> "house pyramid lock uncertain-face happy-face abacus arrow demonic-sillhouette"

“Son, get outta my face with that shit,” the bearded man snarled, and Guero stuffed his pill vial back in his shorts, cheeks burning.

Can't walk. Can't get a job. Can't even sell Percocet to homeless vets. “Fuck you for your service,” he sneered, and backed his chair down the aisles of the shelter.

It was seven in the morning. He was meant to be helping serve breakfast, organize food donations, stuff that worked better when you could lean across the counter or reach high shelves. The shelter supervisor had Guero take roll and hand people their bags back out of lock-up, staring over his shoulder the entire time, but that was a half-an-hour's task and Guero managed to beg off of the bag-handling by pretending to be unable to reach across the table or lift more than five pounds. He was pretending. He was.

In the end he got free to wander the aisles between the tables where the men were eating breakfast, his phone on his lap, recording. He was ostensibly collecting interviews for a human-interest article for the school paper. Pulitzer-shit. That's how you get the big scholarship money: good character (his juvie record had just been sealed) and strong extracurriculars (he had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with, now that he couldn't keep up with his men anymore). But while he asked for these saps' life stories (accountant, can't make rent; currently working two jobs, can't make rent; got divorced and laid off, can't make rent; just found Jesus and got out of jail, can't make rent; gee, it's almost like playing by the rules don't get you nowhere) he also kept an ear out for what he really wanted.

“You ever see this new drug going around? Comes in a blue capsule, white crystalline powder, smells like laundry soap—kinda like PCP and steroids mixed up?”

The man he'd cornered squinted at him. He had two dark moles at the corner of his left eye, and slight epicanthic folds. He had access to laundry somewhere. Smelled like shoe polish. Probably worked as a waiter, maybe even a “white collar” job. You wouldn't think he'd have an ear on the street, but there was more harm in not asking. “What, you mean like what those Blue Crew kids were hopped up on?” the man demanded.

Guero's heart jumped. “Yeah, that shit! I'm doing an article, hazards of the street, designer drugs, that kinda thing. Gonzo journalism, you know. You ever see that? You ever see anybody on it?”

“Not since last year, thank God,” Guero's subject replied. “That was fuckin' terrifying, 'scuse me. Those guys were huge. Crazy. One of those kids, I knew him, he'd come paint sometimes in one of those old stores, and after the gang broke up, it was all he could talk about, where's Doctor Zero and where could he get more of those pills...really messed him up.”

“How about pink pills?” Guero asked, low. “I heard there's these other capsules, pink. Same doctor. You ever hear about those?”

“Shit, no. Kid, my mind is the only thing I got left. I'm not throwing that away on pills. I respect what you're trying to do, but I can't help you.”

He sighed. He'd keep trying. “Mind telling me how you wound up here, then? And could I get a picture? I'll make you look good. Get your best angle.”

Guero got his standard interview (moved out from Vegas, now can't move back), thanked the man, and kept moving down the aisles.

He spotted a man with two tear-drop tats who wore fingerless gloves to eat with. Jackpot. Probably hiding some very incriminating knuckle tats; a lot of the Killaz and Pyros inked their hands, and not with love/hate or playing card pips. “Respect,” Guero said, rolling up to him. He raised his arms over his head and stretched, so the Colt 1911 inked on his inner arm showed. The man watched him with narrowed eyes. “Martin Valdez, reporter for the _Hillrock Buzzard_. No names, no photos, I promise. You look like a dude who's seen some shit.”

“We've all seen shit,” the man replied in Spanish, and Guero switched over to match.

“Buzzard's not your average student paper,” Guero said. “Buzzard's about safety. Real events. The ears and eyes of the people. That's why I keep pounding the street, you know—rolling the street. So dish, what's happening out there? Where we all live?”

The man sighed, looked at Guero over his paper coffee cup. “Everyone knows I calmed down,” he said. “I quit. I've been lucky so far, but one of these days, kid, I'm going to wake up with my head kicked in, when some newbie like you wants to prove he's a real cold-blooded soldier. It's not a game.”

“No, no,” Guero agreed hastily. “Not a game.” He held up his phone, shut off the recording. “See? I respect your privacy. Paper's in English, anyway. I'll translate, paraphrase. I can make you sound like a nineteenth-century railroad baron.”

The man chuckled. “How 'bout King Arthur. Can you make me talk like King Arthur?”

“Regal as shit, dude,” Guero said. “So. What's going on out there?”

A heavy sigh. “ _Weird_ shit, kid. Just. Ever since last year, the city's been standing on its head. Blue Crew wiped all the gangs off the map and then collapsed in a month. Now everybody who's left is finally feeling their oats enough to start staking out territory again. Maybe they'll set down lines and get back to business, except now we got our local Legend, driving around every other night breaking everybody's legs with a crowbar. Robot busts up one gang, their neighbors make a move while half of them are in the hospital, and then the Robot busts up that gang...that's settled down, some, this last month. The big bosses up in San Quentin probably told everybody to keep their heads down until they get a way to take it out. And I _don't_ want to see what they come up with, kid, I really don't.

“But the really weird shit. What's got me up at night.” He leaned forward, and Guero pushed himself closer. “You hear the Pyros've been feuding with the Sawtelles all last month?”

Guero nodded. “Sawtelles went banging on Birch Street, shot El Duro and his lady.”

“Yeah. Well, the Sawtelles claim El Duro was walking around south of Olympic, like he owned it.”

“That's deep in Sawtelle territory,” Guero protested. “Like, even before Blue Crew. That's been Sawtelles' block forever, what was he smoking? No wonder they hit him.”

“That's my thought. What was the man _thinking?_ He had a family. That was grade-school shit. That was _dumb_. But the Sawtelles swear up and down that he went there. In colors. So.” He swirled his coffee and knocked it back. “Don't know what'd possess a man like Duro to do that.”

 _How 'bout possession,_ Guero wondered. Aloud, he said, “Well maybe he _was_ smoking something.”

“He wasn't into that shit, though,” the man said. He stared at his tray. “You hear about people on something new, though.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe coulda—but not Duro.”

“New, what new?” Guero demanded. “Is it a pill? A smoke? Who's slinging it?”

“Jesus, you talk like a cop or a dealer, kid,” his subject hissed, and Guero lowered his head, abashed. _A cop._

“Sorry,” he said. “Just. The people gotta know, you know?”

“I've never seen it,” the man murmured. “But sometimes, you see somebody on it. Someone you know. You say hey. They say hey back. But you get to talking to them, and in five seconds, you know—they're not _them._ ”

“They're tripping? Past lives, fursona sorta shit?”

“It's like nobody's home.” His eyes went wide for a moment, haunted. “And they don't remember later. I asked Tommy, after I saw him like that. He didn't remember talking to me. Didn't remember what he took. Thought he'd just gone around like normal, but I saw him. He was him, but he wasn't.”

“Where can I find Tommy? If I can trace this shit, find out who's selling it—people can't be wandering around East Los like zombies, you gotta keep your head on.”

“Don't you go using this stuff, kid,” the man admonished him, and Guero scoffed.

 _This_ stuff? Zombie shit? Guero didn't want to throw his life away.

He wanted his life _back._

And whoever was selling this new shit, maybe, just maybe, they knew where he could get a blue pill.

 

* * *

 

“ _Verily I saw my friend, a man I kennéd well, behaving passing strange, as though entranced or changéd.”_

Mr. Wakeford dotted the line on Guero's second draft, raised his eyebrow. “That's an interesting choice of diction there.”

“I'm protecting my source,” Guero said. Last spring, he'd slugged Mr. Wakeford in the face. Now he was meeting with him during office hours after school. Probably because Wakeford knew Guero couldn't reach him to punch him again. Well, joke was on him; Guero kept a Glock in the seat of his chair.

“I'm not criticizing,” Wakeford said. “I'm just...I find it amusing. I think your readers will find it amusing. And I'm impressed with your Elizabethan style.”

“Oh, I got all kinds o'style,” Guero said. “Is it fit for publication or what?”

“There's a few hiccups with grammar, and I’ve noted some words where I think you meant to say something else that sounds similar. That’s easy enough to fix. Mainly, when you're writing news—”

“Who, what, when, where, why,” Guero interrupted. “I get it. I'll re-do the first line. But I don't got the 'why' yet. This is just the facts. It's an ongoing story.”

“You're going to keep digging?” Mr. Wakeford asked. “I applaud your commitment, but—”

Guero sneered. “I'm still safer in this hood than you.”

“I don't mean to patronize. Please be careful.”

“What for?”

Mr. Wakeford's dumb blue eyes went wide behind his coke-bottle lenses. “Mr. Valdez, you have a future. You've always had a future. And you have talent. In all your work—when you participated—you impressed me with your attention to detail and your use of facts to support your opinions. Your work on this paper is objectively excellent. I could see you making a career in journalism.”

“I wanna be a chemist,” Guero countered. “Like, a bio-chemist.”

“See? You could support yourself, help others, develop new medications—”

“Like, a chemist who designs drugs.”

“Sure.”

“Or—or a drone operator. Like for the CIA.”

Mr. Wakeford sighed. “I'm sure you could be a great intelligence analyst.”

“I wanna shoot rockets at people. Boom. You dead, motherfucker.”

“I think, if you wanted to, you could do something that supports yourself and helps your community.”

Guero scoffed. “What, and risk my disability check?” He took his rough draft back, stuffed it awkwardly into the bag hanging behind his backrest. “Thanks for the tips, man.”

“You're welcome,” Mr. Wakeford said.

Guero set his brakes as he reached the door so he could slam it behind him, then wheeled toward the library to work, watching up and down the hallway. He put his hand under the fleece blanket folded beneath his thighs, touched the handgrip of his gun. _Please be careful._ Like he ever got to stop.

 

* * *

 

The _Hillrock Buzzard_ that week had an article by Lisa O'Toole about rent-to-income ratios, and an article by Martin Valdez that included a map of gang conflict hot spots and all the rumors he'd collected about a new drug circulating.

Maps and gangs were a potentially explosive combination, but Guero didn't give a shit. Guero lived for danger. Guero wasn't afraid of anything.

Guero wanted a blue pill, or an early death.

Those months he'd spent with the Blüe Crüe last spring had been the greatest time in his life. Not just the pills. The pills made him unstoppable, powerful, but Doc Zabo only gave out pills when he called the men up for missions. What he missed were the dorms. Zabo's warehouse was full of cots and hammocks and lockers; if you had no place to go, you snagged a bed, stuffed your things in your locker, and you could sleep there. Guero had joined on early, he'd been a captain. None of the other soldiers bothered him aside from asking for favors. He'd lived at that warehouse. Got breakfast at a diner, kept his cash in his locker, washed his clothes with his laundromat allowance—there'd been whole weeks when he'd never had to go home.

With Zabo's pills, he could survive anything Hillrock Heights threw at him.

In Zabo's dorm, he could _want_ to survive.

Now he lived with his mother again. A rubber stopper for his door, his cash taped to the underside of his sock drawer. Sometimes she cooked for them. Sometimes he had to cook for her. Sometimes he pissed in bottles so as not to leave his room. She was kind after his injury, for maybe a week.

“Ain't right, the way she treats you,” a boyfriend said to him once. “I'll talk to her. She's got a lot of stress, that's all. You'll see.”

“She's a crazy bitch and you'll be gone in a month,” Guero had said, and he'd been right.

Working on the _Buzzard_ had Guero riding the bus all over the city after school. Sharing his phone number, taping interviews, taking notes, dozing at the library, leaving the apartment before sunup. He sold his dwindling supply of Percocet a tablet at a time. Thought about growing a medical marijuana plant, all legal and shit, except his mom could never leave it alone. Maybe he could carry it with him everywhere, hook the planter to the back of his chair. A little plant buddy.

His old homie Hernandez suggested Guero join him and Julio at In N' Out one Saturday night. “Don't go acting sorry for me,” Guero had snarled, and that had been the end of that.

So now Guero had the _Buzzard._ Mr. Wakeford, Lisa O'Toole, and sometimes this geek who stammered and made the formatting look good. It was fine. It was temporary. Maybe it'd get him a scholarship out of here. Better, maybe it'd get him a blue pill.

 

* * *

 

He found “Tommy.” Tommy swore up and down that all he used was heroin. He didn't buy any of Guero's Percocets. He denied being on Broad Street when the ex-gangster from the shelter had said he'd met him. He didn't know anyone selling blue or pink pills.

His wife, though, Gina—she chuckled as she introduced herself like there was some joke Guero wasn't getting—she'd seen some guy Luca get kicked out of a gas station for stealing hot dogs, acting spaced out, talking strange. And then she'd seen Luca again the same night, completely lucid, claiming he'd been at work all day. Luca did data entry. Gina didn't know which company. Guero gave her his number and a copy of the Buzzard, like he tried to do for all his potential sources, so she'd know he was for real.

He took calls after school and during lunch period. Some people just wanted someone to whine to about how shit their life was, and Guero had to agree, life was generally shit. He didn't have time to listen to their life story, but he couldn't piss them off with a brush-off—what if they saw something useful later?—so he figured out how to disengage them. Usually “Phone's dying,” or hanging up midsentence and turning his phone off for ten minutes. He sorted his contacts by neighborhood and used a pin map to document where people had been seen who might have been on the unknown drug.

In three weeks of working the Zombie story, he noticed some weird patterns.

None of his contacts had ever seen two people on the drug at the same time. Why not? Did it make you immediately wander far, far away from whoever you'd shared a puff with? Guero tried to avoid getting high solo, unless he was already barricaded in his room. But if this was the cool new thing, more people should be trying it out. None of his contacts had heard of anyone trying to push anything new, either. Guero didn't _think_ anyone thought he was an undercover cop, not after he'd tried to sell them prescription painkillers, anyway, and if there was a new drug, he should be hearing about it.

Of course it might not be a new drug. Might be cough syrup. Might be salvia, or magic mushrooms. But the effects of this new stuff were weirdly specific: you'd wander around, steal food, repeat anything spoken to you, run when approached. And you'd never, ever remember anything about the trip. Or even buying the drug.

And when he put dates on the pins on his map, the sightings were grouped chronologically. Like whoever was selling the stuff sold it to one person at a time, slowly moving around East and South Central LA. Why not have a dealer in each neighborhood? And why deal exclusively to the homeless?

Maybe it wasn't being dealt so much as dosed. Maybe a date-rape drug. Except more than half the users were men, and none of them claimed to have even been robbed. Nobody had blank spots in their memory; they thought their day had been normal.

Maybe the witnesses were on drugs.

Maybe it wasn't drugs.

Luca worked data entry. Luca had been kicked out of a gas station for stuffing stolen food in his face like a wild animal, and Luca _still_ worked data entry. Guero texted him, under the table while he tried to memorize the blackboard in chemistry class. _Did you miss any days at work this month?_

Luca replied late at night, while Guero sat barricaded in the East LA Public Library with his newspapers and biochem books. (Another side project: track down any of Doc Zabo's old buddies. Anyone who could have known what made the pills work. Seemed the Doc hadn't been a real friendly type.) Luca said, _No absences. I checked. Major project that day. Stop asking. Wasn't me._

Guero visited the shelter again, early in the morning that Friday. “You hear this crazy rumor, something going around, stealing people's faces?” he asked a young man in a torn windbreaker.

The man threw his plastic fork at his reconstituted eggs. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Yes, that's exactly what's happening!”

 

* * *

 

It turned out Guero had been asking the wrong questions. When he lead with the body-snatcher story, he got a lot more answers.

“Someone stole my bed. The dicks at the shelter said I was there that night.”

“I woke up and someone who looked just like me was sitting in front of my face, staring at me.”

“I know Tomas, right? Well, one time there was two of him. I said, Dude, did you fucking fly here? And he said no. And I said, I saw you at the other end of the block just now, and we ran and looked, and we saw this dude looked exactly like Tomas, just wandering in the road. Freaky as shit, man.”

“I saw El Duro's ghost. It was the day after he'd died. He was just standing there at the bus stop. Never got on.”

The witness who'd seen El Duro was a woman, thirty or forty, who’d lived in a camper trailer ever since her apartment had been torn down and renovated. Guero had been rolling up and down a street on one of the Sawtelles' blocks, fishing for interviews, when he'd knocked on her door. It was eight at night. One advantage of being stuck in a chair: no one was scared of him anymore.

“It's late, hon,” she said, staring down at him from the narrow steps of her trailer. “Shouldn't you be getting home?”

“Got a few more hours to go.” Guero shrugged. “Chasing my story, yanno, truth can't wait.”

“You want a hot pocket?” she asked. “Wait there. I'll make you a hot pocket.”

 _Don't act fuckin' sorry for me,_ was on the tip of Guero's tongue, but he was starving. So he waited while she microwaved a hot pocket and got him a bottled water. Yay, another plastic bottle to piss in.

“Aren't you gonna say thank-you?” she demanded as he rolled away.

“I didn't ask for any food,” Guero retorted.

“Come back any time, you little shit.” She slammed the aluminum door. Guero's stomach knotted and he rolled faster.

 

* * *

 

Guero's current strategy of wandering up and down the streets after school talking to people and angling for a good price for his Percocets naturally weighted his interview pool toward the homeless, teens like him, and street-level dealers. For variety, he tried some bars. “I'm a reporter for the _Hillrock Buzzard_ ” didn't get him as far inside as a fake ID, but he didn't need to talk to the bartenders, he needed to talk to the bouncers. Bouncers would notice identical twins trying to get into the same establishment.

“There's a rumor going around of some 3-d printed face-mapping nanotech kids are using to sneak into clubs,” Guero informed a door guard at a techno rave taking place inside a moldering warehouse. A line of emos and scene kids stretched around the corner, many obviously drunk, some covered in glitter. They glared at Guero suspiciously. Come to think of it, the guard might just be watching for undercover cops. “SHIELD cooked it up and now the law's using it, too,” he added.

This got the guard's attention. “Where'd you hear this?”

“Hitting the street, yanno. Journalism. There's people seeing doubles. You hear how El Duro got hit? There was a double of him walking around after he died.”

“I'll keep an eye out,” said the guard, disturbed, and Guero gave him his number and a copy of the _Buzzard._

 

* * *

 

Guero published an article about the methods door guards and bouncers used to verify IDs, complete with a photo he'd taken of a bar's trophy box stuffed with fifty fakes of varying quality. If the _Buzzard_ cost money, they would have sold out.

Meanwhile, he kept stockpiling information and sorting through old interviews on the doppelganger story.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a much sexier story than New Zombie Amnesia Drug, but Body Snatchers was practically unprintable. Guero needed to be taken seriously as a student reporter. Nonetheless, the body snatchers were out there, blundering around, setting off gang feuds and getting people killed. It was just a matter of time before they cloned Papi Loco or somebody, wandered west of I-5, and started a full-scale war between East Los and South Central.

They needed to be stopped.

Somehow, Body Snatchers had changed from a possible lead on Doc Zabo's drugs, to a possible junior journalism prize, to a problem in his neighborhood Guero needed solved.

“It's like that horror movie, _The Thing_ ,” said a shaky guy in a stained shearling coat. Girl? Guy? Called ‘emself Jenny. Whatever, he anonymized all his sources. Guero just hoped no one he knew saw him talking to this person. “Maybe Robot Racer'll find it and light it up.”

“Man, _fuck_ that asshole,” Guero snapped. “He don't care about people, he's just on a power trip. We gotta take care of this ourselves.”

“What? How?”

Guero shrugged. “Anyone try shooting 'em?”

“But what if it's a robot, or a hologram, or, or what if it can't die—”

“I don't gotta think of everything, fool. You see one. Anybody sees one. You call me. They've never attacked anybody; we just gotta get close, figure out what it is, and then get rid of it.”

 

* * *

 

Next time Guero camped out at the library until close, he got online for some ideas on what this John Carpenter thing might be. He expected to find a lot of bogus conspiracy theories. What he found instead were way, way more _genuine_ conspiracies than he’d ever imagined.

CIA dosing people with hallucinogens? True.

Robot clones? SHIELD tech. But why test out hyper-realistic robots but give them an AI dumber than the average smartphone? And robots don’t need to eat.

Self-replicating robots? Ultron.

Mission-Impossible face masks? SHIELD again. But why steal hot dogs out of a gas station? Why impersonate homeless people?

Aliens? Lots and lots of message-boards about lizard people, half of them talking about Jewish humans and the other half talking about actual shapeshifting alien lizards. But, again, why so dumb? Was it, like, a lizard with brain damage?

How incredibly useless and annoying.

A robot, you could wipe its hard drive with a rare earth magnet. You could buy a magnet with a hundred-pound pull for twenty bucks, plus shipping. But a quick search after that showed that it probably wouldn’t even work: apply sledgehammer, repeat, was the computer guy’s recommendation.

Guero could apply bullet, repeat. Repeat ten more times. And then, like…sand? Sand was really bad for machines. Throw sand on it once he’d punched it full of holes. Might slow it down.

It might not even mean any harm. Probably wasn’t even able to understand the rules for living around here. But that didn’t matter. It had to go.

 

* * *

 

From the library, Guero sent a text out to his contacts.

_Times up for this face-stealing freakshow. East Side rolls hard. You see it you catch it you call me ill blow its head off. (gun) (gun) rucklroad hardboys till I (skull)_

Guero rubbed at the coffin tattooed on his forearm, a spot in the middle where it had peeled and scabbed and the color had faded. Even if the body-snatcher did turn hostile, it wouldn't be a bad way to go.

Better to be ripped limb from limb by an angry robot at eighteen than dead in an alley with a syringe in his arm at twenty-eight.

Within minutes, he was flooded with incredulous texts, some having the temerity to suggest that he was _lucky_ to have broken his back and been forced to quit gang-banging, and he shut his phone off for a couple hours after that.

 

* * *

 

Guero completed an article on crack cocaine and its impact on society, which the school refused to publish, and which landed him in the school mental health counselor's office to stare at the wall for an hour. Mr. Wakefield gave him credit for the article anyway. “I'm too real for these fools,” Guero hissed as he rolled to the library to download more newspaper articles about Doc Zabo's activities in New York. “Next time I'll do society shit. Prom fashion. Upcoming quinceañeras.” No one was nearby to laugh at his jokes.

He missed Hernando. He even missed Julio, the dweeb.

He'd met enough people, talked to enough people, and visited the shelter often enough that now he was getting reports on the body-snatcher right from the streets, without him having to take the bus anywhere. It still hadn't attacked anyone yet. Just wandered around, parroted people's sentences. Started fights it would never have to finish.

 

* * *

 

He got a call at nine-twenty on a Tuesday night, riding the bus after the city library closed. Usually he stayed on the line for its whole circuit, about two hours, killing time until his mom might be in bed and he could go home. Used to be, he'd post up with his men. Drink, smoke, or go looking for strange cars, valuables, something to steal, something to sell. Now it was just him. Just Guero. Nobody to watch his back. Can't run, can't climb, can't hide.

His phone buzzed and he picked it up. _Marco Hnndz Broad St_ calling. Hit accept. Marco was breathless, babbling. “Aay! Fuckin' bugs! Kid, I saw it, I woke up, it had my fuckin' face, vato! My face, right in front of me! I fuckin' chased that thing, I chased it three blocks, right to that little park with the swings, I tackled that thing like a fuckin' linebacker, _I had my hands on it,_ fuckin', _melted,_ homes, it's not a robot, it's _ants_ or somethin', _beetles,_ it burrowed into the ground and I'm posted up next to it with Lupo, I'm at that little park next to the Texaco, on Pine and Javier, you know, you say you can kill it? How do we kill it?”

“What?” Guero snapped. “You're babbling, man. Is the thing there? Where is it?”

“It went under the ground!” Marco yelled. “Like ants!”

“It's ants?”

“I dunno, like army ants, like those ants that build bridges outta themselves on the Nature channel!”

Guero blinked. “Let me talk to Lupo.”

Rustling as the phone was passed over. A new voice, slurred, slower. “You the kid from the paper?”

 _The kid from the paper._ “Fuck,” Guero hissed. An old lady on the bench seat next to the wheelchair berth scowled at him, and he scowled back. “Yeah, Martin Valdez, _Hillrock Buzzard._ Call me Guero. I been following this body-snatcher for a month. You see it?”

“I dunno,” Lupo said, and Guero rolled his eyes. “I'll tell you what I saw. I saw Marco chasing this dude. So I get up and follow him. I lose Marco. I find him again at the park. He's lying down next to this big anthill looking like an angel came down just to wave his dick at him. I didn't see no ants, I didn't see no beetles.”

“Did the dude he was chasing look like Marco?” Guero demanded.

“Yeah,” Lupo allowed.

“Dress like Marco?”

“Yeah.”

“You see any clothes on the ground?”

“No.”

“This anthill,” Guero said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It got any ants comin' outta it?”

“It's dark, the ants're sleepin',” Lupo said.

“So dig into it. If these are regular ants, I'm not comin' over there.”

“Man, I don't wanna get bit,” Lupo protested, and Marco, far away from the phone, yelled, “ _Touch_ that thing? _Fuck_ no!”

“Just _dig into it!_ ” Guero snarled. “Christ! I known twelve-year-olds with more huevos than you pussies!”

“You don't gotta be mean about it,” Lupo complained, and Guero heard more rustling. Shuffling. A shriek.

“What? What?” he demanded. “Pic! Send a pic!”

“It's gone, it's gone deeper,” Marco yelled, and Lupo added, “That ain't ants, man, that ain't ants! Ho-shit, Ho-shit that's freaky!”

“Did you get a pic?”

Lupo answered. “No, it's gone. It's still here, but it's gone. I ain't kicking that thing again. Now what do we do?”

“Now we kill it,” Guero said. He knew this. He'd _read_ this. _Lenningen Versus The Ants._ “We pour oil around it and then we light it on fire.”

Marco grabbed the phone. “Where'm I supposed to get a can of gas, kid? Shit's expensive.”

“Just take it!” Guero snapped. “Suck it out with a tube, put it in bottles! I gotta think of everything here? Mierda! Sit tight, I'll be there in...” He consulted a map, a time table. “Bout an hour and a half. I been chasing this thing so long, I want pics.”

 

* * *

 

Twenty furtively-crossed blocks and one bus change later, Guero found his contact Marco crouched on the lawn of a play-park, a taller man standing beside him. A big sandy pimple, about a foot tall and three feet wide, rose out of the turf. “Alright, fools, you pour the fuel yet?”

The big guy, Lupo, stared at Guero like he was speaking Martian. Guero was about to repeat himself, slower, when Lupo said, “I don't steal. I don't have a tube. We gotta do something else.”

“Fuck this altarboy shit, vatos!” Guero spat. “We got face-stealing bugs!” He smacked his armrest in frustration. “Spot me forty bucks.”

“I need that for my phone plan,” Lupo protested.

“I got seventeen,” Marco said. Lupo coughed up another eight dollars, and Guero covered the rest.

“Dunno when I'm gonna eat tomorrow,” Marco said. “Payday's not 'till Monday, this ain't in the budget.”

“You know anyone looking for Percocet?” Guero grumbled. This wasn't in his budget, either.

“Man, _nobody's_ buying that shit right now, there was a buncha pills going around, half the time it didn't work and the other half you fuckin' died. Everybody's doin' heroin. Cheaper.”

Guero's gut dropped. “But I got—this the real shit, fool! A doctor had me get it from a pharmacy and everything! It's for my back!”

“Dunno what to tell you, kid.”

“Man, _fuck_ this town.”

“No argument there.”

Guero and Lupo went to the Texaco and got a gas can, filled it with diesel. “Don't explode so bad,” Lupo said. Lupo shifted the can onto his shoulder as they walked back to the park.

“Stomp around it first, in case it moved,” Guero told him and Marco. “If it tunneled away, we're out thirty-seven bucks.”

They stomped. Gingerly, at first, and then harder. The ground around the dirt-hill was packed solid.

“Okay, pour,” Guero said. “Make a circle. Not too wide, we only got three gallons.” Lupo traced the edge of the dirt-mound in diesel fuel, pouring steadily. It disappeared into the earth almost as quick as he poured it. “Save a little to dump down the middle, after.”

As Lupo completed three-fourths of the ring, Guero heard a crackling hiss from under the ground.

“Whoa, you hear that? Sounds like bacon frying,” Marco said.

Lupo's hands shook, and the line of diesel fuel got shakier. He finished the circle. “I got a lighter.”

“Wait, wait,” Guero said. He pulled out his phone. “Getting louder.”

“Whatcha doing, kid? Let's burn this thing,” Marco pleaded.

“I been chasing this all month, I told you,” Guero snapped. “I want video.” He pushed himself closer, held the phone low to the ground to capture the crackling noise. The dirt began to heave. Marco fussed in the background, “Kid, get back,” but Guero ignored him: this thing really didn't like being oily. It was coming up. After all this time, talking to dipshit after dipshit, finally he would have proof he wasn't just chasing some bullshit urban legend. He adjusted the zoom on his phone, leaned sideways in his chair to reach over the anthill. The heaving sand shifted, and a flood of humming, multicolored flecks trickled into the light of the street lamps. “This ain't ants,” Guero breathed. “And it ain't beetles.”

The mass of tiny bodies winked and rippled with spots and bands of color. It raised itself into a mound as the earth collapsed beneath it: about the size of four basketballs, churning and crawling over itself to get away from the diesel fuel. Guero waved his phone over and across the space, capturing different lights and angles as it formed shifting arches and spires of itself. How to prove this wasn't CGI? He reached for his bag, dug out a half-depleted water bottle, unscrewed it with his teeth as he filmed with his other hand. Dumped out the water and jabbed at the swarm with the open end. Got the lip of it coated in bugs, shook them off, found a few stuck inside. He yanked it back, set his phone on his lap, capped the bottle. Filmed the insects inside, tilting the bottle this way and that to get rid of the glare. He squinted at them. Weird fuckers. Not shiny like ants or beetles. Almost like maggots with legs, but as small as the little red mites infesting the sidewalks. He only had a dozen or so. Separated from the main mass, he couldn't see their colors. They milled around inside the plastic bottle just like normal ants, but they weren't. Wrong number of parts.

Guero stuffed the bottle safely into his bag, reached his phone back over the mass to keep filming. It churned more and more vigorously, flashing bright stripes of yellow and purple. Signals. Emotions. Intelligence. “This is some X-Files shit,” he breathed, checking the angle on his screen. He'd put up the footage on the school website. Take the bugs in the bottle down to the lab with the microscopes. This, _this_ was a story. Forget selling Percocet. This would get him on national TV.

What if CNN tried to talk to his mom?

Guero's hand dipped. The color-changing swarm of not-insects spiked up under it, wrapped around his phone, his arm, made a bridge out of itself and swarmed over his body. He screamed. Shut his mouth and eyes, plugged his nose with his free hand. The bugs were everywhere, and they were _heavy,_ they squeezed on him, brushed through all the hairs on his arm, over his body, under his clothes. His ears roared with the impacts of tiny feet. They were using him to climb over the diesel fuel to get to safety.

 _Not today, fuckers._ Guero flung himself sideways out of his chair, into the ring of diesel. Tipped over into the dirt heap. His lungs burned from holding his breath. The bugs were wrapped all over him, humming and tickling, pressing him into the dirt, and all at once the pressure lifted, the bugs retreated, and Guero was being rolled over the sand by strong hands.

He opened his eyes and crawled on his elbows a little distance, enough to straighten out his legs so he could roll onto his back. “Thanks, homes. Let's light 'em up!”

“Thanks, homes,” said a strange voice beside him, and Guero pushed himself up and looked into his own face.

“Fucker!” he said, swinging a punch. He couldn't keep himself upright and collapsed back into the dirt. “Get it away! Lupo! Get that thing away from me, what the fuck!” He propped himself onto his elbows and dragged himself backward over the grass. The mound of dirt was beside them. Guero's clone lay on its side, staring at him. It poked curiously at its own legs. They looked just as useless as Guero's. “Dump the fuel on it, light it up, vatos!”

Marco carried Guero's chair over to him and Lupo reached down to grab his arms. Guero batted him away and hauled himself up, lifted his feet onto the rests with his hands.

The clone—the swarm—watched him, its expression neutral, eyes wide. Guero stared down at himself. His long nose, his red scar at the corner of his mouth. His tats. “Light it up,” it said, in the same voice Guero heard whenever he listened to his taped interviews.

“Kid, I think it was trying to help you,” Marco said. “It dragged you right over the diesel fuel. Looked like it hurt it. I think it thought it was hurting you, too.”

“It stole my fucking face!” Guero shrieked. “Lookit that freaky shit! That stupid face! Tell me that didn't scare the shit outta _you_ , Marco, light it up! Light it the fuck up!”

“Fuck-up!” cheered the clone.

Marco reached for the gas can, then shook his head vigorously. Lupo held up his hands. “I mean, yeah, it gave me a scare when it was me. But now it's—I can't kill it when it's you, kid. I don't think it means any harm. It's like a child or an animal or something. Look at it, it's worried about you.”

“Stop calling me kid,” Guero snarled. The clone began to drag itself over the grass toward him, and Guero backed away. “Why don't it body-snatch somebody with working legs,” he growled. “Dumbshit.”

“Maybe it can't remember who it's been,” Marco suggested, watching the clone struggle.

“Hey,” Lupo said. “We caught it. And we didn't have to shoot anybody.”

“Get my piece,” Guero demanded, pointing to his Glock lying in the dirt pile. “My piece and my phone.” Lupo retrieved the phone and picked the gun up gingerly by the barrel, and Guero blew the dirt off and tucked the phone in his pocket, the gun under his thigh. “Well, we still gotta get rid of it. We scare it, it digs back into the dirt and we gotta buy more gas. We can't let it run around here.”

“Give it a bus ticket,” Lupo suggested.

“No,” Guero growled. “Cause what if it never gets off the bus. Just rides the line and gets off right where it got on. No, we gotta...” He groaned. “We gotta drive it out and dump it somewhere.”

“Whose car?”

“I know a guy,” Guero said, pulling out his phone. He stared at it for a long minute, then grunted to himself and called Reyes.

Reyes picked up on the second ring. “Who is this?” Engine noise in the background.

“This is the guy whose back you broke,” Guero hissed. “You owe me a favor.”

About thirty seconds of engine noise. Then, “No.”

“Reyes!”

“No!” Reyes yelled. “No, I'm not—can't talk, busy. Answer's no, Guero. Your decision to run with Zabo's crew. I'm working.” And then he hung up.

“Fuck,” Guero said, staring at his phone.

“Some guy broke your back?” Marco asked, concerned. “What'd he do, hit you with his car?”

“Threw me off a bridge,” Guero muttered. “Fucker.”

“No kidding. He coulda killed you.”

Guero nodded. “He coulda killed a lot of people.”

“You tell anybody?”

“Yeah, nobody cares.” He scowled at the copy of himself that stared up from the grass.

“Nobody cares,” it said with a mournful expression, and reached toward him. Guero shoved its hand away. It grinned at the brief contact.

“Mierda,” he muttered. He got his phone again and ordered a rideshare. Hoped someone would pick up.

It was ten minutes before someone accepted his request.

 _Eliot will arrive in 17-22 minutes in a 2010 Dodge Charger_ , the app said, and Guero blinked down at his phone a moment before he burst out laughing. “Eliot” was the fake name Reyes used to drive for Uber.

 

* * *

 

Reyes arrived twenty-two minutes later, in a big black Charger that was _not_ a 2010 model.

They'd wrapped the fake Guero in the fleece blanket he kept on the seat of his wheelchair—he kept it with him to boost himself higher in the seat, help conceal his gun, and also in case he got cold. He got cold a lot with two dead legs. Guero's gun was in his bag, on his lap.

Lupo waved the car over to the park, where it stopped at the curb. Reyes got out, leaving the motor running. He was in skinny jeans and that dumb striped leather jacket he was so proud of. His hair was so full of gel it stood up like a push-broom on top of his head. He stomped toward them. Reyes was short, but he walked like he was six foot five. Like he could bull through any obstacle in front of him. Which Guero supposed was true, with him being a Ghost Rider and all.

“I whistle you up on my app, you come running,” Guero gloated. “Bet the carnals would throw a couple G’s my way for putting ‘em onto that.”

Reyes stopped short. Something glinted on his forehead as he cocked his head. “What do you want?”

“Want you to take my buddy here home. I’ll pay for him.” Beside him, Lupo stooped and picked the fake Guero up in his arms, keeping the blanket pulled over its head. “He’s real drunk.”

“Where’s he live?”

Guero smirked. “Hollywood.”

Reyes squinted at him. Like he was anyone to talk about bullshit stories. “Where in Hollywood?”

 _Shit._ “None of your damn business,” Guero said.

Reyes raised one bushy eyebrow. “I need an address. You want me to drive this guy somewhere on your passenger account, that's already against the rules. I'm not dumping some helpless drunk on the street.”

“Yeah, I can see the light of heaven shining out your ass,” Guero growled. “What, you gonna drive off now? Leave him with _us?_ ”

Silence from Reyes. His feet shifted in the dry grass.

“What'ya think I'll do to him, Reyes? Take his phone, take his credit cards. Maybe I'll, like, drive over his fingers real good. Come on, Ghostie. Play hero.”

“Why's he in that blanket?” Reyes demanded. He stomped over toward Lupo.

Marco got between them, yelled, “Don't you hurt him! Don't!”

Reyes ducked under his arm. Lupo couldn't run with the weight and burden of the double in his arms, and Reyes grabbed the blanket. “Guero!” he yelled, and whirled on them. He had the park lights behind him, and the streetlights were dim, and Guero swore he saw one of his eyes glow like hot metal. From the curb, Reyes' monster of a car revved and whined. “What'd you assholes do to him? Who are you?”

“I didn't do nothing,” Guero snapped. “Don't act like you care, you fucker. That thing stole my face and we gotta get rid of it.”

“ _Thing?_ ” Reyes demanded, his voice shrill and distorted. 

“I don't know!” Ghost Rider or not, Reyes was as self-righteous as ever. “It's fuckin' alien X-Files bugs! Look at me, _I'm_ Guero. _That_ is not me!”

“Me!” agreed the thing in Lupo's arms, and Guero shuddered. Reyes stared at it.

“Tell it something sappy,” Guero said. 

Reyes crept closer, and Lupo let him. The fake Guero pressed itself back against Lupo's chest, and Marco warned him, “Don't scare it, or it'll dissolve again.”

Softly, Guero heard Reyes tell it, “Don't worry. I'm gonna get you somewhere safe.”

“Safe, get you,” the clone echoed, repeating Robbie's words in the exact same pitch and inflection, like a tape recorder. It reached its hand out to him, and Reyes took it.

“Told you,” Guero called. “It's like a parrot. It don't know how to live around here. We're not killing it, so we got to move it somewhere it can't get anybody else killed.”

“Hollywood,” Reyes said.

“Unless you got any better ideas.”

“I...no.”  
  


* * *

 

 

They got Guero loaded into the car, in the back bench seat, to navigate. Find a nice patch of dirt to release the swarm into. The clone sat in the front seat, where it tried to touch everything Reyes touched and generally made driving across the city a chore and a half. Reyes played terrible screaming music. Guero browsed on his phone and found the address of a public park. Reyes pulled up to the curb, checked for cops, and carried the fake Guero gently out to the lawn.

“Grab the blanket,” Guero demanded. “It's mine.”

Reyes gently untangled the blanket from the swarm of sentient bugs. It kept trying to grab him as he peeled it away. “We just leave him here?”

“It's not a person,” Guero reminded him, and he pulled out his Glock and fired over the fake's head.

The fake Guero's eyes went wide with betrayal before it disintegrated into a flowing granular mass of color-changing silverfish and tore its way under the dirt. Reyes snarled, the _car_ growled and shook all around Guero, and, oh, shit, he was going to die, he was eighteen and he was about to die. He clutched his gun in shaking hands, pointed at Reyes' forehead, at the shining metal just pressing through the skin—

The car quieted again, and Reyes stood there, human, breathing very hard. Slowly, Guero lowered his Glock and tucked it back into his bag. Reyes got back in the car. Suddenly the interior stank of exhaust fumes—Reyes' breath. Jesus. He was a freak. Bullets might not do anything to him.

“What was that?” Reyes demanded.

Guero shrugged.

“What's it do—does it eat people?”

“Don't think so. I got eleven people who saw it. Mostly it just makes you look bad. Been wandering around East Los and South Central for at least a month. Hey, crack a window, this car stinks.”

Reyes rolled both windows halfway down. He only used his hands for one of them. “So you tracked it down.”

Guero scoffed. “I'm a reporter,” he said. “Ain't like it's hard.” In his empty water bottle, a dozen tiny long-bodied bugs crawled curiously over the folds of the plastic. His case. His alien bugs. Guero grinned.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Gang and some gangster names (Sawtelles, Pyros, Papi Loco) were stolen from the back pages of Felipe Smith's other creation, "Death Metal Zombie Cop: Birth Of A Nightmare."
> 
> Guero Valdez is an awful person. He literally stole a wheelchair from a disabled kid (Gabe) the first time we met him in the comics. Later, he broke his back: comeuppance, hur-hur. But as I see him, he plays by the rules of his environment. He looks after his "men," and screw everybody else.
> 
> Guero is a conformist. Robbie is a punk. Everything's topsy-turvy when the only successful people around you are criminals. Being a conformist, Guero adapts to the expectations of the people who have the power to get him advantages he wants. Before his injury, that was his friends and Doctor Zabo. After his injury, that's Mr. Wakeford and the school administrators. He hasn't suddenly started playing by the rules; he's played by the rules the whole time. But now he has to play by different rules, and he's scrambling to adapt. 
> 
> His mother is abusive because that's the backstory I invented off-hand for how Robbie and Guero met before high-school: Guero got briefly taken away and placed in the same foster home as Robbie and Gabe, and he liked and respected Robbie. So of course, when they met again at the same high school, Guero wanted Robbie to join his gang. And then he took Gabe's chair to punish Robbie for refusing. Kids who join gangs tend to have some kind of horrible back-story that pushes them out of their homes and onto the streets and makes a basically suicidal enterprise like gangbanging sound appealing. Otherwise they'd just be violent assholes on their own initiative, like Eli. Guero's mother's abuse is a reason for Guero's criminality, but not an excuse.
> 
> One thing about Guero that you have to respect: he's observant and inquisitive. He noticed Robbie's face missing bruises. He paused Zabo's mission (kidnapping Ivanov) to go investigate some suspicious smoke, and he eavesdropped on Robbie and Johnny Blaze talking: that's why he calls Robbie the Ghost Rider, not the Robot Racer or Roast Rider or La Leyenda. And making money as a criminal requires good people skills. A good memory for faces, excellent situational awareness, persuasion, nuance. He is a smart cookie.


End file.
